Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

SD cards in themselves don't cause battery drain*. The problem is when the card has some corrupted data. There is a program ( metalayer-crawler ) that constantly reads for changes, and it gets hung up on that corrupted sector pegging cpu trying to figure it out.

The solution is to run fsck /dev/mmcblk?p? to fix the bad sector. You can run that occasionally, and/or disable metalayer-crawler. There is an application to disable metalayer crawler and other background apps (can't find it right now) or by command line.

* As far as I know from reading the forums.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

According to comment #28 in bug 2602, SD cards with bad power management could be a reason for low battery life. (It seems the ppl @ Nokia aren't sure themselves, they put a question mark to this item ;) )


At least I can be sure I'm not affected by this one:
Bug #3970 bit me, so metalayer crawler doesn't even start on my tablet.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

Thanks for all the info guys. I had suspected something like what you've told me with the device being "on" but in a sleep state which is quickly reactivated when need be.

And thanks for the tip about Tiger Direct. I realize they may be my only option for a hands on test. I don't get down to Toronto much since I live/work in the Ottawa - Sudbury corridor.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

That number has nothing at all to do with the battery applet. :) It was provided by a Nokia engineer at some point (igor?), and describes the impact on battery life of the boot sequence, which is about 10-20% of total capacity.

Re: Start up Speed / Boot Time
 

As benny1967 says, this isn't accurate. Some cards may not sleep properly, which causes them to consumer way more power than they should while they're not in use.

Tama^2 did some testing with two faulty cards in an N800, which reduced the idle battery life from days to a few hours.